Google promeyours to end sponsorship of climate disinformation, but did not comply, report shows

According to search (🇬🇧), 100 videos – with a total of 18 million views – would fit into what the Google defines criteria to prevent the promotion of this type of activity on your website.

The policy applies to content that refers to climate change as a fraud or hoax, denies the long-term trend that the climate is warming, or denies that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to the climate crisis .

The videos, however, remain available to the public and are sponsored by major brands such as Adobe and Calvin Klein. “This really raises the question of what is the current level of oversight of the Google”, said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, in an interview, reports the The New York Times (*)

Michael Aciman, spokesman for YouTube, said in a statement that the company allowed “policy debates or discussions of climate-related initiatives, but when content crosses the line into climate change denial, we remove ads from running in these videos.” While “we strictly enforce this policy, our enforcement is not always perfect and we are constantly working to improve our systems to better detect and remove content that violates the policy. That’s why we receive feedback from third parties when they think we’ve missed something,” he adds.

Coalition researchers from Climate Action Against Disinformation state that it is difficult to assess the full extent of misinformation in YouTube, as watching videos is time-consuming and they have limited access to data, leaving them dependent on laborious keyword searches on the platform. “I think it's fair to say this is probably the tip of the iceberg,” Hood added, referring to what they found in the study.

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Google sells ads to climate crisis deniers, reveals British newspaper

Even after announcing a new policy banning ads that promote denial of the climate crisis in 2021, the Google sold ads for a denialist conservative media outlet, which spreads misinformation, revealed an exclusive report from The Guardian newspaper. 'Climate change is a hoax' and 'climate change is a lie' are some of the search terms associated with the advertisements. 😠

(🇬🇧): content in English

(*): Content in other languages ​​translated by Google Tradutor

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